A chat forgets.
A canvas remembers.
Plooi exists because the best design thinking doesn't happen in a scrolling conversation — it happens on a surface you can see, branch and return to. We took the methods practitioners already trust, gave them AI muscle, and laid them out as a canvas your brain was actually built for.
Design methods, within reach.
Plooi is a tool, but the point was never the tool. Design methods are how good products and services get made — and for most of the people making things, they sit out of reach: unwritten, untaught, or locked inside an agency. That gap is what we build against.
A better world, by design — where more of what gets built is genuinely designed, because the methods behind it are no longer behind a paywall, a degree or a studio door.
The world we want. Plooi doesn't appear in it — if it did, this would be positioning, not a vision.
Make design methods accessible to everyone who builds — so better products and services come from the craft, not just from the tool.
What we do about it. This one is ours to be measured against.
Built on three things we refuse to compromise.
None of them are about AI doing more. All three are about you doing more with AI — on a surface made for judgment, not just generation.
Craft
We refuse the boilerplate AI soup. Every method in Plooi was hand-built from research literature, tested with practitioners, and tuned to support thinking — not replace it.
Clarity
Every fold is visible. Every transformation is auditable. No black-box outputs — you can trace any insight back through the methods that produced it. Glass-box reasoning, not magic.
Curation
AI proposes; you decide. Plooi generates variations, alternatives and refinements — then waits for your call on which to keep. Human-in-the-loop is non-negotiable.
Spatial · Agentic · Glass-Box.
Three values need an architecture. Ours rests on three commitments — the reason a Plooi canvas feels different from a prompt box the moment you touch it.
Spatial
Work lives in 2D space, not a 1D thread. Position carries meaning, related methods sit together, and the whole shape of your thinking stays in view — pannable, zoomable, never scrolled away.
Agentic
Methods aren't static templates — they're agents. Each one takes inputs, does real work, and hands structured output to the next. Chain them and the canvas runs the workflow, not just stores it.
Glass-Box
Every step shows its work. Inputs, reasoning and sources are all on the surface, so you can audit an insight, correct a wrong turn, and trust what you ship. No magic, no hidden prompts.
Every method has a job. Four categories cover it.
The Plooi method library splits into four functional categories. Mix them like Lego — most workflows use one or two of each.
Data & Input
- Source · PDFs, URLs, CSV
- Persona · captured archetype
- Goal · what to optimize for
Processor & Reasoning
- LLM · GPT-5, Claude, Llama
- Chain-of-Thought · visible reasoning
- Critic · adversarial check
Action & Tool
- Search · web research
- Generative UI · text → wireframe
- Simulator · scenario testing
Logic & Control
- Router · conditional flow
- Aggregator · gather + sort
- Human-Approval · the pause
One canvas. Three altitudes.
The canvas zooms semantically. Pull back for the whole shape of the work; lean in for one cluster of methods; lean further to read a single method's prompt. Same surface, three levels of detail.
100% · see the shapeWhole-workflow shape. You read the topology — branches, fan-outs, dead-ends — without reading a single label.
200% · read the labelsCluster scale. Names are visible. You decide which branch to dive into next.
400% · read the promptInside a single method — prompt, model, confidence, output. Full glass-box, nothing hidden.
Three kinds of connection. Each tells a story.
Connections in Plooi aren't just lines — they carry meaning. A solid line says "this data flows directly here." A dotted line says "this influences that conceptually." A curved-back line says "iterate until it's good enough."
Direct transfer
The output of A becomes the input of B. Strict type-check, no ambiguity. The bread-and-butter of any workflow.
Conceptual pull
B is influenced by A but doesn't consume its raw output. Used for shared context, themes, or system-prompt inheritance.
Iterate to good
The output keeps refining until the Critic agent gives a green light. Generate, critique, generate again — automatically.
Four patterns. Infinite workflows.
Every Plooi canvas — no matter how big — is made of the same four primitive shapes. Once you can read them, you can build anything.
Chaining
One method feeds the next. The simplest discipline: A produces, B refines, C delivers. Most workflows start here.
Routing
Pick the right next step based on the input. Negative sentiment? Route to escalation. Positive? File it and move on.
Parallelization
One brief, five concepts at once. Fan out the work, let agents run in parallel, then gather and rank the results.
Evaluator–Optimizer Loop
Generate → critique → generate again. The output keeps refining until the Critic agent gives a green light.
Trust, by the colour. No hidden hallucinations.
Every method wears its confidence on its border. Green for high, amber for medium, orange for low, terracotta for shaky. Locked methods pause the workflow until a human signs off — so you always know when to trust, when to read, and when to step in.
High
Medium
Low
Very low
Awaiting review
Locked gate
Open any method. See the seams.
Every Plooi method is a glass box. Open it to see the prompt it's running, which model is wired to it, its confidence score, and exactly where the output came from. No black-box magic — just legible craft.
- Visual provenance. Trace every output back to its source quote.
- Confidence-aware. Low-confidence methods wear an amber dashed border.
- Human gates. Mark any method "requires approval" — the canvas pauses.
One orchestrator. Three minds at once.
A service-design example. The Orchestrator spins up three sub-agents — User, Backend, Support — to simulate a "lost credit card" journey in real time. Their messages stream into one timeline, so you can see exactly where the failure modes happen.
Friction surfaced: User waited 1m 6s for the block-card action to fail before discovering the phone fallback. Add: instant push-notification reassurance after 5s of locked-DB retry.
A workflow you keep folding tighter.
A Plooi isn't built once and frozen. It starts as a rough sketch, earns a Critic and a feedback loop, branches for edge cases, and ends up team-owned and re-runnable. The same canvas, six months apart.
A few empty methods, dropped on a blank sheet. No wires yet — just the shape of an intention.
→Filled with a brief and one set of sources. Six methods wired into a first pass. Output: rough, but real.
→You added a Critic, a feedback loop, and a branch for edge cases. Output: now trusted.
→Team-owned, branched per project type, exports to JSON for CI. Now genuinely reusable.
Start with a sheet.
End with a workflow.
The philosophy only matters if you can feel it. The fastest way is to open a sheet and fold a workflow yourself.